The United States imports close to 13 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products each day. Saudi Arabia isn’t the biggest supplier. Not Nigeria or Venezuela or Kuwait either. It's Canada. Nearly 20% of U.S. oil and oil products come from there. And nearly half of those come from Alberta province’s Athabasca oil sands, a reserve of bitumen, which is a semi-solid form of oil. The proven reserve may total 1.7 trillion barrels, at least 10% of which is economically recoverable. That makes the sands second only to Saudi Arabia as a reservoir of oil. In the past eight years, production from the sands has more than doubled from 600,000 barrels a day to 1.3 million barrels a day.
A recent report by IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, chaired by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin, speculated in one of three scenarios that the amount of Athabascan oil produced could quintuple in 25 years, and the amount shipped to the United States could nearly double.
That sounds good given the traditionally friendly ties Canada and the United States. But oil production takes significant amounts of water, and the surface mining process destroys boreal forest and boggy muskeg. Companies are legally required to restore the land, but not with forest or bog. The larger problem is the emission of greenhouse gases. Canada has failed to meet its emissions goals under the Kyoto compact. And, so far, about 4% of the country’s greenhouse emissions come from oil sands production. When oil production rises, so will the emissions. The Integrated CO2 Network (ICO2N, an industry consortium, has proposed carbon capture and sequestration to ameliorate the problem.
But, as Shawn McCarthy reports in Friday's Globe and Mail:
The much-touted carbon capture and storage technology is not the answer to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from oil sands projects in northeastern Alberta, Environment Minister Jim Prentice says.
While Ottawa and Alberta are spending billions of dollars on CCS demonstration projects, the minister yesterday acknowledged what critics have said all along: The technology has limited application at the energy-intensive mines and in situ projects that extract the bitumen from the ground. ...
"CCS is not the silver bullet in the oil sands," Mr. Prentice told The Globe and Mail's editorial board. ...
The oil sands represent the fastest-growing source of emissions in Canada. Without dramatic mitigation efforts, Canada will find it nearly impossible to meet its target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent from 2006 levels by 2020, according to the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, a government-appointed advisory group. |
The rescue begins below and continues in the jump.
scorpiorising discussed Palast says "Oil and Indians Don't Mix": "His brief tale of oil exports makes you want to cry, and drastically cut back on oil consumption. Which is exactly what needs to take place in protest of the exploitation of the earth's ecology, and indigenous peoples, as the corporatocracy seeks dominion over all of the earth's resources that, quite naturally, belong to the people. ... But the Indians in Peru know all about this, as they struggle to protect their renewable resource, the rainforest, against the intrusion of global capitalism. In the meantime, companies like Chevron have already had their way in South America."
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The Overnight News Digests is posted and includes the story: CIA adopting Web 2.0 tools despite resistance.
In another installment of his Marine Life Series, Mark H wrote Coral Bleaching: "As the term suggests, coral bleaching is the whitening of living coral colonies, a phenomenon associated with anthropogenic changes in the animal’s habitat which lead to the weakening of the colony’s health and its eventual death. Let’s take a look at what exactly is being bleached, what’s causing the bleaching and why bleaching is so devastating to these animals and their ecosystem. On the left is a healthy piece of living coral. On the right is the same colony only one month after conditions in the surrounding water changed. These photos were taken in the Florida Keys by M. Brandt, of the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science in 2005, a year that was a particularly bad one for corals around the globe."
jsmyers talked about Smart Grid and Rail...Synergies Abound: "There are significant synergies between sustainable transportation and sustainable energy. Not only do electric and plug in hybrids get helped by smart electrical grid technology, but electric rail transportation helps make renewable electricity happen."
Flyswatterbanjo took a gander of the fare at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival: "Crude looks at the "Amazon Chernobyl" case, the largest oil-related environmental lawsuit in the world, which pits indigenous Ecuadorans against Chevron, and has been going on for 16 years."
Anna Phelan of the Amnesty International Corporate Action Network reported Big Oil Finally Pays in Nigeria: A Victory for Corporate Accountability: "My mom called me to tell me that a settlement was reached in the Wiwa v. Shell case. She saw a report on the nightly television news earlier this week. That’s how I knew this story was really big news. In Tuesday’s Guardian (UK), Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr. talks about the families’ decision to accept the settlement with Shell. He says, the choice ‘enabled [the plaintiffs] to advertise the settlement as a living, breathing example of how and why the commitment to peace, non-violence and dialogue is the best way to resolve the challenges in the Niger Delta.’ What better advertisement than international news coverage?"
mem from somerville alerted us to the World Food Prize being awarded: "Let me tell you about the life and work of this scientist that you probably haven't heard yet. This is someone who is responsible for a remarkable success in African agriculture. Ethiopian scientist named 2009 World Food Prize Laureate. Gebisa Ejeta of Purdue University developed drought- and weed-resitant sorghum, enhancing food supply in sub-Saharan Africa."
Nulwee was dazzled by the discovery of a Pristine old-growth rainforest and NEW species!: "British scientists have found a previously undocumented virgin rainforest in southern Africa. Just using Google Earth(!), they narrowed down the high points on Africa's eastern seaboard, noticing a green patch of healthy looking forest in northern Mozambique. Then they took off! and made a discovery more typical of 1909 than 2009! The find is being hailed as a ‘lost Eden,’ all the more remarkable for being on the mainland of one of the continents."